The English Translation Of Chinese Culture-loaded Words

Farmers’ proverbs contain the experience of agricultural activities and farmers’ life experience,passed on from one generation to another by famers orally.Proverbs are usually brief and concise,which reveal the correlation between climate,weather,geography,human activities and agriculture.As an important part of Chinese agricultural civilization,farmers’proverbs are treasure of Chinese splendid traditional culture.In the context of introducing and spreading Chinese culture to the outside world,translating farmers’ proverbs into English helps in promoting the knowledge of Chinese traditional culture in other countries.This thesis is based on the author translation of the section Cultivating and Breeding in Farmers’ Proverbs 800.Culture-loaded words posed difficulties in translation,therefore,this thesis focuses on the translation of culture-loaded words.There are four chapters in this thesis.The first chapter is a description of the translation task,which introduces the translation project and the author’s task.The second chapter elaborates the preparations the author did for the translation task.The author at first analyzes the lexical features of proverbs and concludes the translation difficulties-the translation of culture-loaded words.Then the definition of culture-loaded words and previous studies of their translation are reviewed.The author then tried to search for English parallel texts but rarely found any.So the author decided to resort to online resources and English-speaking personnel.Therefore,translation tools and resources are explained in the following section.Finally,strategies to follow in translation are explained.The third chapter categorizes two groups of translation methods under the umbrella of the translation strategies of domestication and foreignization.To convey the meaning of the original text while it’s impossible to convey the cultural information,the strategy of domestication is usually adopted,the method of free translation and substitution translation are used.To keep the cultural information in the translated text,the strategy of foreignization is adopted,liberal translation,liberal translation with annotation,transliteration and transliteration with annotation are used.And the last chapter is a conclusion,in which the author reflects on her own translation practice.The author holds that domestication and foreignization should be complementary to each other.Translation of culture-loaded words aims to convey cultural information.Translators must take the English reader’s reaction into consideration,estimating English readers’ acceptance and adopting appropriate methods.Either domestication or foreignization should be applied to throughout a text.Domestication helps to spread Chinese culture,and foreignization promotes readers’understanding of the translated text.It is also concluded that to produce qualified translation,preparation of background knowledge as well as the use of translation tools,online and human resources are very important.And it is also very important to finish the translation task within a relatively short period of time rather than spending more than several months in finishing them.